Same Old Whine, Different Bottle.
Playing Politics With Genocide
How The Democrats Are Using The Armenians To Get Their Way In Iraq
By Ralph Peters
In the midst of the First World War, the Young Turks who had taken over the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against their Armenian subjects. At least a million Armenians were murdered - with nauseating cruelty - or died of abuse, heat, hunger and thirst.
The only reason any survived was that the Turks lacked the administrative skills and technologies to kill everyone. Not every captive fit into the burning churches. On the death marches across Anatolia into the Syrian desert, guards ran out of bullets. And even sadists grew weary of bayoneting children and clubbing old men to death.
Women were raped by the tens of thousands. Many were raped repeatedly. Then they were killed. Or enslaved. Or left to die of exposure by the roadside.
Ancient communities were annihilated. A magnificent culture - the remnants of the world’s first Christian kingdom - drowned in blood.
Only Turks question this history. The eyewitness accounts are extensive - not only from Armenian survivors, but from American and German consuls and missionaries. The documentation is readily available (texts crowd one of my bookshelves).
Hitler cited the Armenian Genocide as an inspiration for the Holocaust - the lesson he drew was that the Turks got away with it. The world never intervened. Apologists for the Allies blamed the war. The truth is that the eyewitnesses went ignored: Armenian lives had less value then than do those of Darfur refugees today.
Last Wednesday, the Democrat-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution formally declaring the Armenian tragedy what it was: genocide. Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to bring the resolution to a vote on the floor, after which it would go to the Senate.
We need to stop it. It’s a travesty and a betrayal. Of Armenian-Americans. And of our troops.
Make no mistake: I’m on the Armenian side in the court of history. When the same resolution came up in years past, I supported it. The Armenian survivors - their descendents, at this point - deserve justice.
And I have no sympathy with the Turks. The Turks are jerks. After the United States supported them unswervingly for more than a half-century, they stiffed us the single time we needed help - when we asked to move an Army division through Turkey on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
And the Ankara government has led an internal campaign of anti-Americanism far more lurid and vicious than the old Soviet bloc’s anti-Western propaganda. It’s not just Turkey’s Islamists, but its secular nationalists, too. The anti-American hatred spewing from the Turkish media is uglier than Barbra Streisand at four in the morning.
The Turks tormented their Kurdish minority for decades - and express outrage when Kurds respond. Now they’re threatening to invade northern Iraq, while whining that honor-killings, pervasive corruption and anti-Western venom shouldn’t deny them membership in the EU.
Despite all that, we’ve got to kill this resolution. It’s not the wording - but the timing.
Legislation similar to this has come up repeatedly in Congress, yet it’s always been defeated - in 2000, because of pressure from the Clinton administration. But if the resolution passes the House and Senate now, the Turks plan to evict us from Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey, to halt our military over-flight privileges and to shut down the supply routes into northern Iraq.
That’s what the Democrats are aiming at. This resolution isn’t about justice for the Armenians. Not this time. It’s a stunningly devious attempt to impede our war effort in Iraq and force premature troop withdrawals.
The Dems calculate that, without those flights and convoys, we won’t be able to keep our troops adequately supplied. Key intelligence and strike missions would disappear.
The Pentagon might be able to improvise other options. But the loss of the base and those routes would definitely hurt our troops. Severely. And we’d be more reliant than ever on a single, vulnerable lifeline running from Kuwait.
It’s a brilliant ploy - the Dems get to stab our troops in the back, but lay the blame off on the Turks. They pretend they’re responding to their Armenian-American constituents - while actually moving to placate MoveOn.org.
For the Democrats in Congress, it looks like a cost-free strategy. For our troops? When did the Dems give a damn about our troops? This resolution isn’t a stand in favor of historical justice. It’s an end-run that ducks behind the bench. It’s one of the most cynical betrayals in our legislative history - of our troops, of Armenian-Americans, of the Kurds under threat from the Turkish military and of the people of Iraq.
We can’t let Pelosi & Co. get away with this one. We need to call the Dems on it and make it clear that we, the people, know what they’re trying to do.
Every human being with a drop of Armenian blood deserves justice. This isn’t it.
Ralph Peters’ latest book is “Wars of Blood and Faith.”
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democrats aren’t all about the troops and they’re not all about the Armenians. What part of this don’t we understand?
October 15th, 2007 at 4:34 amRetired generals in time of war should just STFU. These generals that withhold their advice from the President and retire, and then instead, put forth a full effort to ridicule the President, have, in my view, retired in disgrace.
“It just leaves me exasperated that he would say some of these things. I think it demeans the work that soldiers have perspired and bled for all this time. This is like last year’s coach saying that you can’t win the game.
Well Coach, you were the one leading us and calling the plays, so whose fault is it that we are where we are?
On the plus side (I guess) is that he said we have no choice but to stay the course. Oh, and his retirement will be spent as a consultant who will be training other generals. Will there be a course on tact?”
October 15th, 2007 at 6:58 amthe genocicde wasn’t that huge according to this documentation
http://www.box.net/shared/gidmvsx9cc
so, if it is still time to reverse the vote, you may find some argumentation there
October 15th, 2007 at 7:55 amI think the story is getting out and the coward congressmen are going to be too scared to vote for it on the floor. They didn’t think the public would make the linkage–stab an ally in the back (while going to an enemy and kissing up (Pelosi), stab our troops in the back, dredge up some long ago injustice and bring it to the fore only to be used to defeat our national interests. I know the word “treason” is tossed around alot, but REALLY, if this isn’t, what is?
October 15th, 2007 at 8:59 amfrenchie:
Trying to pervert our views with non-facts again? Since when is any kind of genocide “not that huge”? For your information baba 1.5 Armenians were slaughtered in that genocide campaign. That slaughter included closing up a church full of Armenians and burning them alive; bashing Armenians to death with bats after running out of bullets in the Syrian desert, raping 100,000 women and either murdering them afterwards or enslaving them.
Not that huge huh?
October 15th, 2007 at 9:41 amThat 1.5 stat is 1.5 million!!!!
October 15th, 2007 at 9:42 amDan…and the Frenchies assistance in the facilitation of Hitlers plan wasn’t that “huge” either…right..Nothing is huge when you’re eyes are closed. Book ‘em Danno!
October 15th, 2007 at 10:01 amDanny,
that’s we were told for ages, but in the link I provided, it is said that the numbers were exagerated, because of a convenient occidental policy after WW1, in order to make the division of the Ottoman empire ; make a little effort for once, try to read a while what I found, (a whole afternoon of searching !)
October 15th, 2007 at 10:05 amWell said, Captain.
You know, the temptation to turn to the dark side must be unbearable. So easy…just utter a few words damning the administration and the war and you are in like Flynn…book deals, $$$, celebrity, adulation from leftist dopes, political office. You hit it on the head.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:11 amFrenchie:
The Armenian massacre and related massacre of Greeks is a well documented event. Your links are worthless. It’s too bad you aren’t very smart. Must be a product of that fabulous French public school system, eh baba?
However, if you wish to remain just another ignorant, blind, stooge of the left, by all means do so. I really enjoy laughing at your ignorance. Comment less and study more.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_armenia.html
October 15th, 2007 at 11:47 amsteve m:
Yep. Frenchie is a true nazi sympathizer. Just the kind of useful idiot that the jihadis love. She must not have much of a life either. It’s almost 19:00 hours in Paris, and she’s here instead of out on the town. She must be one ugly broad.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:53 amDan your link isn’t more valuable, just one reference !
and it is 9 and I work at home (which is not Paris but a 20 rooms mansion
) Mr “proutprout” !
October 15th, 2007 at 12:05 pmFrenchie:
The link is only valuable to someone who is looking for truth. That would be a subject that is foreign to a socialist bottom feeder such as yourself. Isn’t it past your bedtime?
October 15th, 2007 at 2:43 pmMay be I’m missing something here…Didn’t Gen Sanchez state the media as a cause for operational failure… and blame them due to their political bias and false reporting to further the demcratic political goals..
.
October 15th, 2007 at 4:29 pmjim:
Sanchez basically pointed the finger at everyone and everything including the media. In my view he’s undermining his own troops and giving our enemies in the media and around the world more fodder for their grist mills. I go back to two paragraphs of my original comments:
“It just leaves me exasperated that he would say some of these things. I think it demeans the work that soldiers have perspired and bled for all this time. This is like last year’s coach saying that you can’t win the game.
Well Coach, you were the one leading us and calling the plays, so whose fault is it that we are where we are?”
It goes back to the speech that Douglas McArthur gave to West Point many years ago. Duty, Honor and Country aren’t just pithy specifics for an active duty officer to follow.
They are a lifetime virtues that should be embraced by ex-military officers as well. Undermining an ongoing war effort by second-guessing or hindsight is not exactly the kind of thing that they teach at the military acedemies.
It’s the kind of stuff that bitter men and women engage in.
To me it is a character flaw.
I’m with Iggy, I can’t call Sanchez a general anymore…unless I preface my remarks with the phrase “retired general fuckup”.
Retired generals in time of war should STFU. Mark my words, when this war is won, Sanchez is going to look like a complete ass for disparaging his CIC.
This may have been a description of Sanchez once, but no more:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
- Teddy Roosevelt
October 15th, 2007 at 7:22 pmDanny, how silly I am to expect that an American would confess that, as a french, I might be right
October 16th, 2007 at 6:26 amFrenchie:
How silly would I be to expect that a french leftist like you could tell the difference between fact or fiction in history? Please don’t breed.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:41 amhttp://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3088/attack20parrotattack640za1.jpg
I surrender
October 16th, 2007 at 12:42 pmFrench,
Ivory Coast ring a bell? *cough* mass murder by French troops *cough*
October 17th, 2007 at 2:31 pmstreet docter, you were there of course ?
don’t believe the BS that are said specially there
October 17th, 2007 at 3:20 pm